Bitten By the Red Hat Perl Bug 234
snydeq writes "Smart coders always optimize the slowest thing. But what if 'the slowest thing' is the code supplied by your vendor? That was exactly the situation Vipul Ved Prakash discovered when he tinkered with a company Linux box on which Perl code was running at least 100 times slower than expected. The code, he found, was running on CentOS Linux, using Perl packages built by Red Hat. So Prakash got rid of the Perl executable that came with CentOS, compiled a new one from stock, and the bug disappeared. 'What's more disturbing,' McAllister writes, 'is that this Red Hat Perl performance issue is a known bug,' first documented in 2006 on Red Hat's own Bugzilla database. Folks affected by the current bug have two options: sit tight, or compile the Perl interpreter from source — effectively waiving your support contract. If a Linux vendor can't provide comprehensive maintenance and support for the open source software projects you depend on, McAllister asks, who ever will?"
Re:Don't throw out the baby with the bath water (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That's what you get. (Score:3, Funny)
Well, I'm anything but a hardcore Perl hacker -- just use it to pragmatically list some rubbish now and then -- and I've never even heard of compiling your own Perl.
You certainly don't qualify as a perl hacker! NTTAWWT. ;-)
From the very beginning, the primary (and recommended) way to get perl has been to download the source and compile it yourself. It's true that most unix/linux distros have included perl for a decade or so, and of course it's usually not the current version. But this is only a minor time saver during installation. I've often upgraded to the current perl while installing systems, and I've always found it easy.
The idea that a perl user wouldn't even have heard about the easy availability of the source is sorta surprising. That's the way you're supposed to get it, after all. The standard textbooks start off telling you where to get it (or at least they did the last time I looked at one, which has been a while ;-).
OTOH, perl does have a bit of a reputation for being solid and without any problems, so it's easy to see how someone might be lazy and just use whatever the vendor supplies. I wonder what went wrong with the RH release?
Re:If they aren't fixing simple bugs... (Score:3, Funny)
Except he *wasn't* paying for the support contract!
By definition if you are running CentOS, you are saying, "I'm so smart I don't need a support contract. If something goes wrong I'll fix it myself." And then he complains about getting bitten by the "Red Hat Perl Bug".
If Red Hat is so Horrible (And by extension CentOS), why is he running it? If vendor supplied component X is worthless, why isn't he running Gentoo? Oh, that's right, because having a stable platform is *valuable*. But, it would appear, not valuable enough to pay for.
Re:Don't throw out the baby with the bath water (Score:5, Funny)
Eventually, someone at experts-exchange.com gave me the answer to my problem.
You had me until then.
Re:Redhat? (Score:2, Funny)
And how exactly do we know this? ;-)
I was referring to the guy who committed the not-so-random ssh key generation bug. (I was actually trying to be funny, but failed miserably. I read my comment again and am ashamed as the lack of quality control)
Re:Old versions in repos: Not unique to redhat (Score:2, Funny)
I have that problem in Gentoo all the time...seems like every time I want to install or update a program, I have to compile it.
Re:waiving your support contract? (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, and on what kind of boxes do you run your Cobol programs, grandpa?